


so, baby, drive slow 'til we run out of road

by scribblscrabbl



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, De-Aged Dean Winchester, Episode: s10e12 About A Boy, Established Relationship, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 05:08:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10847097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblscrabbl/pseuds/scribblscrabbl
Summary: Once Tina steps onto the bus, what's left is early morning quiet; the shack passing for a bus terminal that's seen better days; Sam with his hands stiff in his pockets; and fourteen-year-old Dean, trying to be composed about the whole thing while his eyes tell Sam that inside, he's having the mother of all freak outs.





	so, baby, drive slow 'til we run out of road

**Author's Note:**

> No underage warning because nothing untoward happens. Sam's gotta draw the line somewhere, okay.

To Sam, Dean has always been larger than life. Sure, he's had his share of fuck ups and there are some lessons he never learns – how finely the line spools out between pride and straight-up stupidity, for one. Sure, Sam's seen him bruised, battered, scared, to the point where all those pesky physiological markers of fear trump that militantly honed instinct of his to be an asshole about his feelings. Sure, he's looked as fragile as anybody the times he's been at Death's door. But all of that's inconsequential when Sam's sensed as early as four, when he just started grasping at abstractions, something immense about Dean's presence, impervious to change.

So it's a little unsettling when he sees Dean de-aged, like he just hopped out of Doc Brown's DeLorean, a little punch-drunk, and his only thought is: _Jesus, he was a scrawny kid_.

*

Sam can't stop staring. 

Intellectually, he knows it's counterproductive, knows this is just a drop in the ocean of weird shit they've sailed over the years. Emotionally, it's a colossal mind fuck, on par with those fragments of Lucifer embedded in his ragged, resurrected soul. Not toxic or perverse, but excruciating all the same. Because with it there are memories, trickling out and lapping against him, pure and sweet. Because it's the perfectly engineered illusion of a clean slate: nothing scarring Dean's forearm, and nothing between them that's fractured past healing.

When Dean says, "Sam, this is problem solved," Sam feels the need in his chest like a third-degree burn.

*

Once Tina steps onto the bus, what's left is early morning quiet; the shack passing for a bus terminal that's seen better days; Sam with his hands stiff in his pockets; and fourteen-year-old Dean, trying to be composed about the whole thing while his eyes tell Sam that inside, he's having the mother of all freak outs. 

Frankly, Sam's not far behind. He let himself think this could be a blessing in disguise rather than the universe screwing them over for the gazillionth time. The kind of ambiguously good karma only a Winchester could appreciate: messy, more than a little fucked up, unduly roundabout, and rife with irony. Now, in broad daylight, he sees it for what it really is: another dumpster fire making them run around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to put it out with a concoction of truly dubious ingredients that may or may not just end up being the ideal accelerant.

He can feel that edge of panic pressing against his underbelly, intimately familiar. But he figures if he's gonna be the adult in the room (he'll be damned if he doesn't get in a few dozen more jabs at Dean's expense before this is through), then he should pull it the fuck together.

"Until we get you back to normal, don't even think about touching the radio."

"Aw, c'mon, Sammy – " Dean starts, a whine threaded through his consonants.

"I heard you murdering Taylor Swift's greatest hits in the shower this morning. Consider this an intervention," Sam says.

Dean promptly shuts the hell up.

*

Surprising to no one, researching curses with _Freaky Friday_ Dean is pretty much par for the course. Sam sends him into the bowels of the bunker to retrieve some arcane text detailing the 101 uses of yarrow and an hour later, finds him in the kitchen eating the Chef Boyardee Sam precisely earmarked FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY straight out of the can and taking swigs of Bud. All in all, a sight that under any other circumstance would make Sam feel morally obligated to call child services.

On the third day, they get sidetracked by vamps sipping on doe-eyed teenagers outside Lincoln – a pair still riding the high of being newly made, sloppy and overconfident, which means it should be a quick job, bloodless on their end, with none of the usual cat-and-mouse bullshit. Except Dean's now half his normal body mass and overestimating his weight and reach in addition to his center of gravity. He comes within a hair's breadth of getting his throat ripped open by an undead hipster before Sam intervenes.

For the next three or so hours, Sam's jerked in and out of a single nauseating flashback: Dean getting turned, the fight leeched out of him, while Sam watches with vague interest like it's a _60 Minutes_ rerun.

When they've carried dinner back to the library – salad for Sam and mac 'n cheese with ground beef and hot sauce for Dean, whose shitty eating habits, it turns out, give Sam less anxiety when he knows Dean has the cholesterol levels of a teenager – Sam's gut is still churning like he's eaten something more substantial than a gallon of coffee and a couple Altoids in the last twenty-four hours.

"I don't think we should take on any more jobs until we figure this curse out," he says, braced for aggression.

"What? Why – " It takes Dean a second to get going, and then he's accelerating from confused to combative, so fast it gives Sam whiplash anyway. "Oh, fuck you, Sam. You don't get to coddle me because you graduated from Sasquatch to King Kong. I can handle it. The exact same way I've handled everything since before you were fucking potty trained."

"Dean, I'm not – " Sam grips his fork, throat squeezing reflexively around his mounting frustration, an exhaustion that feels tattooed onto his goddamn bones, and a flutter of despair that, at its root, has nothing to do with Dean attracting hoodoo the way normal people attract mosquitoes. "I just – "

"Jesus, Sam, just spit it out so I can eat my food in peace," Dean says, sounding less spiteful than sick and tired of being at war all the goddamn time.

He's playing with his fork, staring belligerently at his bright orange macaroni, shoulders defensive, lashes just as stupidly pretty as they've always been, mouth a temptation of biblical proportions, but cheeks rounder than Sam remembers, hair kitten-soft, washed clean of vanity. Back then they'd had their petty squabbles, engaged in their share of mud-slinging and sibling rivalry that ended five times out of ten in bite marks, hurt feelings, or both. But that ugliness always faded, never engendered any resentment, only Dean's smart-ass, more than a little revisionist account, sometimes months later, of how it went down that would've made Sam bite him again if his affection hadn't been so embarrassingly obvious – so _easy_.

And maybe that's why Sam, instead of snapping at Dean for being obnoxiously cavalier about his own life, says: "What if I hadn't been quick enough today? Maybe Dad trusted himself to watch your back, but I'm not Dad. I can't – It's too risky. I need you to come out on the other side of this alive, all right? I need you alive. Please."

*

Dean listens to Sam for once, only bitching for an hour or so about needing to nurse something strong so the boredom doesn't get him first, before letting them settle into a comfortable silence as they pore over creepy Germanic folk lore, the breadth of which, Sam finds, is depressingly massive.

Over the next few days there's an atmospheric shift in the bunker, a thawing between them that makes room for old habits Sam just figured they'd grown out of: Dean pouring them each a bowl of cereal in the morning, letting Sam add his own milk because he hates it soggy; Sam picking up a couple slices of pie with the takeout; Dean mutely tapping a finger against the back of Sam's hand when he's dug up a potential lead; innocuous pranks that inevitably escalate into dirty games of one-upmanship just begging to end in the crippling embarrassment of a trip to the ER. It's not exactly what Sam bargained for, but, frankly, it's a profound relief – the release of a breath he forgot he'd been holding, coupled with an easing of the kind of chronic ache brought on by continuous wear and tear.

For a week, curse notwithstanding, their lives are quiet, uncomplicated, _good_.

*

In retrospect, he was clearly just being willfully obtuse. 

The truth is, there's no such thing as uncomplicated with him and Dean. Uncomplicated had summarily fucked off ever since Sam's last year of high school, when he had backed Dean into the side of the Impala out in broad daylight and kissed him until they were both panting for it, then freaked out and applied to Stanford. Which is to say that Sam should know their brand of emotional clusterfuck when he's mired in one. At present, it's Dean's warm glances, verging on feverish when he thinks Sam isn't looking. Sam's edges frayed by a reflexive need he sometimes thinks he's carried around all his life, like a congenital heart condition. And all of it lacquered over with the kind of calm that only ever comes before a shitstorm.

Sam blames it on the confinement, all the waking hours spent being the only two warm bodies in the room. He blames it on Dean's libido, which on an average day is like lightning in a bottle, but now is magnified by about a thousand and clearly causing Dean a great deal of distress if his disappearing acts during the day are anything to go by.

It's all Sam can do to keep himself from reaching for his brother over the table and slapping him around a little until he stops thinking with his dick. Until Dean gets that for all the moral ambiguity of Sam's past actions, Sam draws an unwavering line at touching Dean, hell, smiling at Dean, in any way that could be misconstrued for as long as one look at Dean steeps Sam in memories of flying kites and eating marshmallow fluff mac 'n cheese. 

His one solace is that Dean in his current condition doesn't stand a chance in a physical altercation if it comes to that. Among all the consequences, both tiny and earth-shattering, of Sam's four-year repudiation of their freak show life that will cascade in perpetuity, the one Dean's most comfortable giving him shit about is losing his edge in hand-to-hand combat. Kid-sized Dean, though, hasn't pushed his luck, and Sam would find it infinitely hilarious if kicking his brother's cursed ass solved all their problems. 

*

By the tail end of week two, Dean's more or less resumed his secondary profession of functioning alcoholic, and, for better or for worse, it's stopped tugging on Sam's maternal instinct.

This morning, Dean strolls into the library and uses the edge of the table to pop the cap off his Sam Adams, saying, "You know, I'm starting to think this hiatus ain't half bad. Not the beach vacation I was hoping for, but if I kick my feet up and close my eyes, I can almost hear those waves."

Dean drops unceremoniously into the chair beside Sam, arranging himself into a lazy, feline sprawl, and for a minute Sam sinks into the fantasy, feels the dry heat of the sun and smells the brine lapping at the illusion of a shoreline.

"Pretty tragic lack of hot chicks, though."

Dean cracks open one eye to peer at him, lips twitching. "I guess you'll do."

There's something guileless about Dean's answer, no hint of seduction – an utter absence of anything untoward, actually; Sam knows the topography of Dean's face better than he knows his own. It's a sweet, palpable intimacy that sends a pang of longing spearing through Sam like it wants to cleave him in half, and, God – he _misses_ Dean, so goddamn much. And once he's past the initial shock, he can feel the aching chasm, extending beyond now, beyond this bullshit curse, back to the verbal abuse he hurled at Dean for not knowing when to quit, to the year of domesticity he cobbled together with Amelia, all the way back to the night he walked away from Dean lying on that motel floor littered with shattered glass, jaw hard but eyes wrecked with the entrails of hope that Sam loved him enough to know better. 

And in between every fracture of their lives Sam remembers what it's like to laugh with Dean, to kiss him, dip his tongue into Dean's mouth and taste all the girly, teary confessions Dean's not hardwired to say out loud. He remembers how Dean likes to be fucked – in any and every position so long as Sam's letting loose all that raw strength he prefers to keep on a tight leash; the slurry of absolute filth that comes out of Dean's lovely mouth when Sam's got him dazed and pliant; that soft warm space between waking and sleeping where Dean forgets about all the potential threats to his manhood and buries his face in the curve of Sam's neck, mouth damp against Sam's collarbone, mumbling, heartfelt, _I don't know how to do any of this without you, man_ , making Sam think most days it's not the world they're trying to save, it's each other.

Sam sits perfectly still, trying to modulate his breathing. Emotional train wrecks he can handle, though that's maybe a separate cause for concern and a psych evaluation. It's the sudden arousal stirred up by all the memory association that reminds him they haven't touched each other in weeks. Makes him want to bang his head against the table because he literally can't imagine a worse time to get a raging boner, then put as much distance as possible between him and Dean, who's sipping on his beer and flicking through some ancient tome in his lap, the fucking picture of innocence.

Sam opts to skip over the self-harm and go straight to the running away.

"Be right back," he says, strained.

The plan is to lock himself in the farthest bathroom and take care of business – conjure up an image of Dean with sweat beading down his chest as he rides Sam, single-minded and wholly shameless, if only for efficiency's sake. And he's in the goddamn middle of following the plan to completion when there's a sharp rap on the door.

"Sammy? You okay in there?"

Sam, startled, jerks the hand he has around his cock, and then traps a moan in his throat, momentarily doused in deer-in-headlights panic.

"I'm fine," he responds, a beat later, more than halfway convincing, but his brother is a clever son of a bitch when he wants to be, and an honest-to-God bloodhound when it comes to any real or deluded possibility of getting laid.

"You sure?" There it is: the lascivious tenor bleeding through, corrupting the pitch of Dean's voice that hadn't yet deepened to its full potential at 14. Jesus Christ. "I could, you know, lend a hand. C'mon. Just unlock the door."

The request trails off into something akin to a whine, threaded through with need, and okay, Sam's gonna have to shut this crap down before they add another emotional scar to their collection they'll still be branded with in the afterlife.

"Dean, no. Just _no_ ," he grinds out, yanking his jeans up and hoping his dick will lose interest in the face of his escalating frustration. It doesn't.

"It's nothing I haven't seen a million times, Sam. It's still me in here. Old me. You know what I mean." Dean's starting to _reason_ with him, which means the desperation's ratcheted up to an alarming degree and with it, the willingness to employ every trick in the book to wear Sam down.

Which is nothing Sam hasn't dealt with a million times, so he hardens his voice – the way their dad did to impress on them how expensive a mistake can be in their line of work – and says, "I won't fuck us up more than we already are, Dean. I won't. And I'll stay locked in this goddamn bathroom for as long as I have to until you calm down."

There's a few seconds of silence fraught with tension built up over God knows how many days – a powder keg just waiting for an accidental spark. Sam only realizes he's holding his breath when Dean ultimately says, "fine, see if I offer to do you any more favors," hostility edged with petulance. Then he hears Dean stomp away.

He sinks down onto the floor, shoving his hands into his hair, still half-hard, and waits, waits until he's mostly sure Dean actually grasps the enormity of the situation and isn't lying in wait around the corner to ambush him.

When he finally lets himself out and wends his way back to the library, Dean's nowhere to be found.

*

It takes Sam about twenty minutes of driving towards civilization to spot the Impala. Dean might be smarter and more resourceful than even Sam gives him credit for, but he's predictable in anger, seeks out what's familiar and centering whenever he feels like something's been wrested from him. Which is why Sam finds him holed up in Benny's Bar and Grille, hustling a couple of inked-up bikers with impunity and his eyes infectiously bright, which to anyone unschooled in the art of the Dean Winchester con comes off as naivety but to Sam is just evidence of the undying thrill his brother gets from this living fast, dying young crap peddled by his stupid mullet rock. 

That said, Sam normally grabs a beer and hangs back, trusting that they've both been in the trade long enough to know how to cull their marks – obviously intoxicated, preferably slow and stupid.

But this, this is not normal by any stretch of the imagination. This is Dean in his puny 14-year-old body, barely edging out the length of his cue stick, sipping fucking iced tea as he beams at a guy who's three times his body mass and has probably crushed windpipes with his steel-toed boot. So Sam marches over, ready to unobtrusively manhandle Dean out to the car if necessary, except Dean beams at him, too, then shrugs and drops his cue stick. Dean says, loud and clear as he trails after Sam, "whatever you say, pops, you sure you don't want a drink for the road?" which is the precise moment it becomes clear to Sam that this was Dean's endgame. The little fucker. 

Pretty much every head swerves to stare after that, and Sam chooses to suffer the humiliation in silence until they step outside.

"You're a dick and I hate this fucking curse," he says, then tailgates Dean the entire drive home.

*

Two days later they discover the cure, completely by accident, when Dean's trying to see how many 16th century texts he can balance on his head and Sam's snapping at him to quit it before he mutilates a first edition.

"We're gonna have to ask Cas to hunt down some of this stuff," Sam says, taking stock of the ingredients, ranging from commonplace to truly macabre.

"Oh, c'mon. We don't need to drag Cas into this," Dean says, snatching the text out of Sam's hands. "Once you've made one hex bag, you've made 'em all."

"So you've dug up a lot of sacrificial baby bones in Bavaria I take it," Sam says, dry as tinder.

He doesn't really see why Dean's so neurotic about involving Cas, because, well, it's _Cas_. Who understands humor as a concept but none of its practical applications, even after all this time wading in the endless stream of Dean's bad jokes. Who's non-confrontational and non-judgmental – the clear outlier among his dickwad angel brethren – so would never laugh at the asinine crap that's forever hitting them in the face. 

And he doesn't. He just looks at Dean for a minute after Sam gives him the whole tiresome rundown, ponderous, like he's filing it assiduously into the vast compendium of crazy shit he's borne witness to over the centuries.

Then he says, "An unfortunate predicament but it could be worse."

There's a long, pregnant pause before Dean says, "Gee, when you put it that way, I just wanna click my heels and go singing in the rain. Thanks for putting it all in perspective, Cas."

The general antagonism is about as subtle as getting whacked in the face with a two-by-four. Cas, to his credit, doesn't let it derail him. 

"That wasn't an attempt at optimism, I was only making an observation."

"Fine, okay," Dean crosses his arms over his chest, "define worse."

Cas waits a beat. "Well. You could be an infant with no control over your bowel movements."

Sam, who's been quietly working through the countercurse in a conscientious effort to make like Switzerland, bursts out laughing and can't stop for a full ten seconds. Cas looks mildly confused. Dean just glowers, then says, "You two keep bonding over how hilarious my life is. I'm gonna go get a beer."

"Dean, c'mon, it's not – " is all Sam gets out before Dean disappears around the corner, looking even more pissy over not having a door to slam in righteous indignation.

Cas drags out the seat across from Sam and for a minute they just sit there, Sam fiddling with the cuff of his shirt under Cas's unnerving scrutiny and Cas completely oblivious to Sam's climbing discomfort.

"You know what's crazy?" Sam says suddenly, mostly in a desperate bid to break the silence, but maybe also because it's been gnawing at him: one of those truths that doesn't starve in the dark, just grows more terrible. "Now that I know we can cure this thing, I'm not relieved. That's crazy, right?"

Cas peers at him, considering, then says slowly, "So what you're saying is you don't want to cure him."

"No. No, of course I do. I just – " he stalls for a second, reflexively, the way you swallow even when the bile's already halfway out of your throat. "There's something easy about how we are, right now. I mean, there's a host of problems to deal with, there always is. But it's less real, you know? Everything feels – warmer, sepia-toned like those old-timey pictures. It's so damn selfish, but – when I look at 14-year-old Dean, I don't think about all the crap we've waded through, all the people we've lost, all the things I've done that I can't take back. I don't think – "

"You don't think what?" Cas asks, with curiosity more than anything else and probably only the kind that propels you through an incredibly underwhelming book for completion's sake, but it's good enough for Sam.

"That I won't be able to fix us because whatever's broken is broken too deep," he says – voice small, as if any louder and it'll trigger a cataclysm, the wholesale destruction of the world even Lucifer and Michael and their entwined destinies couldn't manage. "That maybe it was the price we had to pay to do our jobs, save all those people – and maybe it wasn't worth it, if this is what we're left with. That I'm betraying Dean for even thinking it. But, hey, I already have a spectacular track record when it comes to disappointing my brother."

"Sam."

Cas pauses, probably regretting ever allowing Sam a window of opportunity to share now that he's waist deep in the sewage of Sam's doubts and hackneyed self-recrimination. Sam can't look him in the eye, half embarrassed that he's probably thoroughly violated the parameters of their relationship, half fearful that Cas will pull a Cas and tell him exactly what he doesn't want to hear because it's the truth.

"You know, before that day I was told to pull Dean from Hell, I rarely meddled in human affairs," Cas says. "And when you've existed for as long as I have, that means a lot of time spent watching. Studying the bewildering spectrum of humanity. For better or for worse, it was never boring. All the pain and suffering, depravity and kindness. The astonishing resilience. Nuances that wouldn't exist without free will. And then there was love – the most familiar concept and, as it turned out, the most foreign. I remember thinking I understood. Angels loved God, after all. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to get up to speed. On how primal it is, and how singularly complicated. The forms it takes, some driving people to madness, murder, some so beautiful you can't bear to look away."

Cas goes quiet for a minute, and Sam still can't really believe this is his life: getting cryptic advice from an angel gone rogue because he literally has no one else to turn to, his brother sulking somewhere, wallowing in teenage angst, Cain's curse hanging over their heads like a guillotine with its rope frayed thin.

"What you and Dean have – most people would envy it," Cas says, so earnest it hurts, almost as much as it hurts to hear what Sam believed to be true, once. "I've seen a lot, but I've never really seen anything like this. Love tested on such a terrifying, cosmic scale, not just once, but over and over again. Sure, you've struggled, made mistakes, nearly given up, but you two have passed the test, Sam. Every time. You always find each other."

"I just – sometimes I feel like we're only together because it's become easier than being apart," Sam says, then runs a hand over his mouth because, Jesus if that doesn't make them sound like an old married couple too entrenched in their habits to want to put up with the paperwork needed to file for divorce.

"It's an exercise in futility to wish for things to stay unchanged, believe me." Cas says, more than a little self-deprecatory. "Still, the bond between you and Dean, some essential part of it is inviolate, that much I know. How you repair the rest – I have absolutely no idea."

Sam huffs out a laugh, then says, "Thanks, Cas. We'll figure something out. We always do," by rote, but inevitably underneath that, out of the dogged idealism that grows in him like a weed and still makes him fall to his knees on their worst days and pray for a miracle.

*

Cas tells them he should be able to procure the ingredients by morning, which means Sam resigns himself to lying in bed, wide awake, heart thumping, and running methodically through worst-case scenarios – something that's always had the bizarre effect of calming him down, and that Dean considers proof of how much of a freak slash nerd he is, next to making to-do lists and reloading the entire dishwasher because Dean doesn't do it right.

In the sealed-in dark of the bunker, his room could pass for every other room he and Dean have crashed in across the breadth of the U.S.: outfitted with the bare essentials, air consistently stale from the shitty ventilation, the probable asbestos in the walls. Only, he knows it's not, even staring at the ceiling, because there's the acute absence of Dean softly snoring, Dean mumbling nonsense in his sleep, Dean reaching out and fumbling inelegantly for Sam, smacking him in the jaw before sliding warm fingers across his mouth, down his throat, then, content with what he's found, settling them against Sam's chest.

For the third time in as many nights, Sam tries to head off a panic attack, refusing to be inured to the loss, to the consummate silence asphyxiating him by degrees that feels more like loneliness than all the time Dean spent in Hell and Purgatory combined.

He's in the middle of a three-part breath when he hears, "Sammy? You awake?"

He turns to see Dean, in a t-shirt two sizes too big, hair sticking up every which way, shuffling across the room to sit on the edge of the bed. He stares at his lap, plucking at a loose thread, looking unbearably small and young and lost in the dark.

"My knees don't crack when I go up and down the stairs. I'm gonna miss that," he says, instead of just biting the bullet and admitting he's scared, and Sam hides a smile.

"We don't have to break the curse. You can stay in this body and get cooed at by women whenever you're within a 10-foot radius of any bar," Sam suggests.

"I'm not gonna miss it that much," Dean clarifies.

He plucks at the thread some more until Sam thinks he's going to get up and leave.

Then he says, "I heard what you said to Cas. About us being broken and all." 

Which is when Sam experiences a moment of breathless vertigo, the planes of his world rearranging all at once, and he can't say for sure if they're sliding into or out of place. Either way he can't for the life of him get his tongue to work, and there's another terrible moment where nothing happens at all, seconds passing with excruciating effort like honey through a sieve. 

Finally Dean turns to face Sam, licking his lips, eyes downcast, knowing Sam would have no qualms about mining them for secrets.

"I think about what your life could've been like if I hadn't roped you back in. I think about it all the time, Sammy," Dean murmurs, words hushed and somber, fitting for a confessional. "You were right to run, to try to hold onto something normal. I was the fucked up one, and a selfish son of a bitch to boot. I couldn't quit the life but I couldn't let you go, so I decided I had to have it both ways. And look where that got us. If I'd just let you – "

Sam reaches out, lightning quick, and grabs Dean's arm, digs his fingers into the soft flesh above Dean's inner wrist hard enough that he'll be wearing a bracelet of bruises in the morning.

"Don't," Sam says, hand jerking, making Dean topple over onto his elbow.

"Jesus, Sam – "

"Don't, all right?" Sam repeats, low and fierce for all he feels sick with the knowledge that Dean still thinks he sentenced Sam to this life, their life, and still crucifies himself for it. "Azazel, God, Lucifer, whoever, would've dragged me into it anyway. And even without their meddling, I wouldn't regret it. And neither should you. With the way we live, we both know we're gonna burn out sooner rather than later. I'm not gonna waste the rest of it thinking about how it could've gone. This is a sure thing now. You're a sure thing."

It's a reality that's unfolded, inexorable, over the years: the salt-and-burns, the bullets to the heart, the heft of a blade in one hand and holy water in the other, week in and week out until the warfare became muscle memory, every breath, every heartbeat spent in the trenches until one day Sam looked over at Dean on some long heat-soaked stretch of interstate and realized Dean was everything, as if the certainty had calcified overnight, and he hadn't felt even a little bit terrified, just loose-limbed and trusting, the way you succumb, wholly, to sleep.

"Sam," Dean says, halting, eyes on Sam now, wide open, close enough that the riot of emotion, spread across the uneven geography of old wounds and pains, drags Sam for a minute into a dizzying confluence of past and present. "Look, you don't have to – "

This time Sam tugs on Dean's arm gently, shifting backward until Dean twists around and joins him on the bed. He throws his pillow on the floor so their eyes are level, and they curl their bodies towards each other, knees just shy of touching.

"Dean, I'm not trying to be _nice_. I'm – " Sam clenches his jaw and makes a, frankly, heroic effort to not reach out and smack his brother on the head. "Look at me, Dean. Really _look_ , and you'll know I'm not lying."

Dean stares at him, swallowing, and Sam waits, trying to neutralize his terror by pretending this doesn't feel like the final fork in the road, where one direction leads them home and the other to the earth heaving open right under him, the fall so long and tortuous this time even God won't be able to exhume his bones.

Dean stares at him, then finally, finally says, "Okay," and it's the echo of some small, luminous thing blooming like delicate petals that Sam cradles in his own chest, greedy and possessive.

Then Sam says, "You don't have a monopoly on regret, you know," because he has this unfortunate self-destructive habit of running his mouth when he should just shut the hell up.

"You've always had my back, picked up the pieces when I screwed up. You've never given up on me. Even when I've done fuck all to earn it. Jesus, Dean, half the time I've taken it for granted. And maybe when I was a kid I just didn't know better, but now – I'd say there's something wrong in me, but then I'd just be pretending all those dumbass choices hadn't been mine to make. They were, and I'm sorry, I'm – "

"Sammy, don't," Dean says, sounding like his throat's been burned, stripped raw. "Don't, all right?"

Sam thinks, trying not to do something so utterly inappropriate in this moment as laugh out loud, that maybe the real curse here is they're bound in this dysfunctional, hellishly interminable loop of hurtful recriminations and crushing guilt, that even multiple deaths and resurrections couldn't shatter.

"It hasn't exactly been sunshine and roses the last couple weeks, but being in this body's got me thinking." Dean blinks at Sam, pupils wide and dark, before he turns to lie on his back.

"It's normal to experience some unsettling changes during puberty, Dean," Sam says solemnly.

"Shut up. You want me to share my friggin' feelings or not?"

Sam keeps quiet and watches Dean's mouth twitch, then his chest rise with a steadying breath.

"After a while, you just don't realize how easy it is to let all the dark shit suffocate everything good. Losing Dad, Bobby, Ellen, Jo, thinking I lost you for good, so many times – and one time was more than enough to tear me to pieces. But we've had a lot of good times. The time we snuck into Disney World when Dad was tracking the djinn, remember? We ate so much Dippin' Dots I still can't believe we didn't barf on Space Mountain."

Sam laughs, now, flipping onto his back, their sides of the bed still neatly delineated.

"I'm pretty sure only gravity was keeping that stuff from coming back up at that point." He remembers: the pellets of mint chocolate, cookies and cream, birthday cake, all crammed into a single cup that ultimately just transmuted into a generically creamy, sugary mass, but twenty-odd years later feels more immense, like a secret alchemy that would render all those long-winded books on the keys to happiness obsolete.

"Didn't stop us from going on that ride three more times, though."

"Yea, well. You were perving on that chick ten years older than you. I went for the stars."

"Dude, she was hot. You're just a gigantic nerd. It's okay, Sammy, nobody's perfect." Dean nudges the back of Sam's hand with his knuckles.

Sam doesn't rise to the bait, just says, "You gave me that astronomy book a week after. I loved that book. We hiked out to the bluff by the motel and picked out all the summer constellations. Stared up at the sky until we got God awful cricks in our necks."

For a minute they're both silent, adrift in nostalgia, until Sam bumps their knuckles together again, then threads their fingers together, heart spasming at how small Dean's hand feels in his.

"I miss you," he whispers, the sound a ripple in the dark.

Dean's hand clenches like a knee jerk before squeezing with intent. "Miss you, too, Sammy."

*

Cas reappears bright and early, and, barring the few seconds when Dean, fraught with nerves, leans a little too close to the proceedings and lights the hem of his shirt on fire, the countercurse works exactly as promised.

"It worked," Sam says moronically, staring at Dean, at all his tiny imperfections, and feeling a heady, unchecked rush of gratitude, distantly aware he might start crying at any moment and finding he doesn't actually give a damn.

"I'll give you two a moment," Cas says, astute enough to recognize the potential for awkwardness that's likely to linger in perpetuity given the sad reality of their collective emotional maturity. 

"Thank you, Cas," Sam says, but doesn't take his eyes off his brother, watches him push up his sleeve and expose the Mark, then slide his thumb over it with an intimacy that, for a second, makes Sam sick thinking he was a selfish piece of shit for wanting Dean back when the alternative was keeping Dean _safe_.

"Hey, hey, look at me," he says, taking Dean's face into both hands and tipping his chin up until they're eye-to-eye. "The goddamn Mark is temporary, you hear me? This is permanent."

He doesn't wait for Dean to agree or argue, just leans in and crushes their mouths together, licking at the seam of Dean's lips until Dean gets with the program and opens up with a needy little noise, then slides their tongues together, warm and slick – kisses Dean thoroughly, with all the patience required for a slow, simmering burn. Then he pulls away, shuddering at the protest that rumbles deep and desolate in Dean's throat, thumbing at Dean's lower lip, swollen and wet, and can't help bending down to suck on it one more time.

"If you want me to buy what you're selling, you're gonna have to try a little harder than that," Dean says, eyes brightening by degrees, mouth salacious but lashes coy because he fucking knows the study in contrasts pushes all of Sam's buttons.

It's an exercise in sheer force of will to stay perfectly still and Sam pulls through by the skin of his teeth.

"I'm serious," he says. "I'm not saying it's gonna be easy. It'll be hard as hell like it always is. The thing you want the most never comes easy, right? But that's how you know you want it."

He feels Dean's hands reeling him closer by the hips, then feels them slide under his shirt and palm his bare skin, the constancy of their heat making him think of stars that burn for eons without approaching extinction.

"God, you're such a sap," Dean says, drawing Sam in with a hand shoved in Sam's hair until he's smiling against Sam's mouth. "But it's okay, Sammy, nobody's perfect."

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Taylor Swift's "Fearless". Comments always very much welcome, and thank you for reading!


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